of our men after the bombardment, and then Captain F. guides us a little further to a huge mine crater, and we sink into the mud which surrounds it, while my eyes look out over what once was Ovillers, northward towards Thiepval, and the slopes behind which runs the valley of the Ancre; up and over this torn and naked land, where the new armies of Great Britain, through five months of some of the deadliest fighting known to history, fought their way yard by yard, ridge after ridge, mile after mile, caring nothing for pain, mutilation and death so that England and the cause of the Allies might live.

“There were no stragglers, none!” Let us never forget that cry of exultant amazement wrung from the lips of an eye-witness, who saw the young untried troops go over the parapet in the July dawn and disappear into the hell beyond.  And there in the packed graveyards that dot these slopes lie thousands of them in immortal sleep; and as the Greeks in after days knew no nobler oath than that which pledged a man by those who fell at Marathon, so may the memory of those who fell here burn ever in the heart of England, a stern and consecrating force.

  “Life is but the pebble sunk,
   Deeds the circle growing!”

And from the deeds done on this hillside, the suffering endured, the life given up, the victory won, by every kind and type of man within the British State—­rich and poor, noble and simple, street-men from British towns, country-men from British villages, men from Canadian prairies, from Australian and New Zealand homesteads—­one has a vision, as one looks on into the future, of the impulse given here spreading out through history, unquenched and imperishable.  The fight is not over—­the victory is not yet—­but on the Somme no English or French heart can doubt the end.

The same thoughts follow one along the sunken road to Contalmaison.  Here, first, is the cemetery of La Boisselle, this heaped confusion of sandbags, of broken and overturned crosses, of graves tossed into a common ruin.  And a little further are the ruins of Contalmaison, where the 3rd Division of the Prussian Guards was broken and 700 of them taken prisoners.  Terrible are the memories of Contalmaison!  Recall one letter only!—­the letter written by a German soldier the day before the attack:  “Nothing comes to us—­no letters.  The English keep such a barrage on our approaches—­it is horrible.  To-morrow morning it will be seven days since this bombardment began; we cannot hold out much longer.  Everything is shot to pieces.”  And from another letter:  “Every one of us in these five days has become years older—­we hardly know ourselves.”